


Above Rubies

by Miss_M



Category: The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith
Genre: 1950s, Canon Continuation, Canon Lesbian Relationship, Established Relationship, F/F, Friendship, Gen, Independence, Relationship(s), Theatre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-02 13:36:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5250119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carol insisted the world was still where they had to live, but the world was not always the same as it had been the day before. Therese had understood this that morning in Waterloo. Living was a verb in the potential mode. That sounded like one of Carol’s epigrams, which had overawed Therese with their wisdom of implicit experience when first they’d met, and which she still loved to hear from Carol’s lips.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Winter

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing.

It was January again, and Therese was working as Harkevy’s assistant again. Seasons and jobs recurred, but what she noticed the most were the differences between the present and two years earlier. 

Then, winter cold hadn’t arrived till after Christmas to grip the city in a vise. Therese had been in love and convinced she was all alone, and she’d worked in a void, making models and hunting out people to call about jobs, with no hope of anything coming up for her. 

That morning there were snowdrops in the rectangular patch of dead grass in front of Carol’s building. Moving briskly along the steaming pavements in her coat which swung around her legs as she walked, its rich garnet-red color attracting attention from passersby, Therese was convinced she could almost smell the first green sprouts in Central Park a block away. People were looking at her and not just her clothes, really noticing her as she passed in a wake of measuring glances. 

Being looked at had taken surprisingly little getting used to. 

And while she was working with Harkevy again, Therese understood, as she had not done before, that Harkevy liked her as well as her work. He had been the first person to look at her idea for an interior opening inwards, like a series of Chinese boxes, and take it seriously. He was not indulging or humoring her, the little girl trying to become a stage designer. If he had, he never would have paid Therese any attention at all. 

This had required a little more getting used to.

That morning they were supervising the construction of the set for a Broadway play. A spare interior with some benches and tables, and a couple of mullioned windows, which could be easily transformed into a domestic interior, a church or a courtroom. The play was about New England Puritans and their witch hunts. Two young actresses in white wimples and severe black dresses were giggling in the wings while the costume designer scolded them quietly for not keeping still when Therese arrived, shedding her coat as she rushed to join Harkevy on the stage. 

“Nu, Therese,” he greeted her, stroking his neat, small moustache with a long forefinger.

She began to apologize for running late, but he waved this away and gestured around the half-built set. “A political play disguised as history,” he commented. “In Russia before I left, people staged such things at great peril. Here, the only peril is the producer winding up with bare coffers and a short run.”

“An even worse fate,” Therese said. 

Harkevy smiled and nodded, glad that she understood him so easily, without the need for more words frittered away in explanation. 

Therese returned the smile. They had worked together several times since that first January. She would not have guessed that an orphaned girl from Jersey and a European sophisticate could find common ground so easily.

Around midmorning, after Therese found a small error in the measurements, which presumed the stage to be about two feet longer than it was and required the position of the mullioned windows to be shifted slightly so they would flank center stage, Harkevy uttered an exasperated imprecation and announced it was time for a break. They left the workers to saw and shift what needed to be sawn and shifted, and retreated to their tiny office. The cinderblock walls lacked windows, and the chairs were as hard as those in Therese’s school, but the walls were festooned with sketches, which made all the difference. 

Harkevy sent a boy to fetch them coffee from the Italian deli around the corner and lit one of his long black cigarettes. Therese produced her own cigarettes in a slim silver box with a carving of vines around a cursive T on the lid: her Christmas present from Carol. 

Harkevy clucked in appreciation when Therese showed it to him. “Good taste,” he murmured, stroking the carved silver with his fingertip. “Exquisite taste.”

He sat back, relinquishing the silver box, and regarded Therese through the cigarette smoke. Then he began to talk about plays which might or might not open in the near future. He talked in a general sort of way, airing his grievances about the state of modern theater as much as telling her about possible jobs. 

“Francis is all agog over some new play he has just seen, featuring two tramps on a bare stage. The audience kept interrupting the actors with hoots and whistles. I think this audience knows better than Francis. He thinks he could stage it on the cheap, in a small space for a recherché audience. He says it might shake things up. I cabled him back to say he can shake things up by finding another controversial play, which would make money and avoid putting members of the stage designers’ union out of work.”

Therese laughed. Francis Puckett was well-known for his enthusiasm for any and every play to come out of Paris, but the idea of claiming credit for the design of a bare stage did not appeal to Therese. The stage could not be truly bare, at the very least there would be a backdrop of some kind. If it looked like a part of the theater building, unaltered, having the stage designer’s name on the program struck Therese as both boastful and dishonest. 

She had made some interesting, intricate designs in the past two years, both on her own and while assisting Harkevy and others. She was still waiting for her first ballet. Her old model for _Petrushka_ hung in her bedroom, where only she and Carol could see it. Therese kept it as a talisman, a sort of personal wishing well. If anyone ever asked her to do _Petrushka_ , she would produce a new design, an even more ambitious one. Something which required a revolving stage or utilized trapdoors and pulleys to give the dancers a challenge and make Therese’s name. 

She had yet to shed her slight contempt for Village types, who seemed to spend all their time talking about the books they were going to write, the plays they would stage one day. Therese would not be content except by actually doing the work, earning the right to walk those streets, where every building was packed tight with artists like sardines in a can. 

The boy came in with their coffees in demitasse cups, steaming like the streets outside. He tipped his hat to Harkevy after the older man tipped him, swept his eyes over Therese before he left. She was wearing a tweed skirt because of the cold, but her legs were bare as she was sitting in a low, straight-backed chair. 

She let the boy look without acknowledging him except to accept her coffee. Therese was getting used to the look of surprise in people’s eyes when she talked about her work, the unspoken assumptions about career girls living alone in the city. Therese never lied when they asked her if she had a fiancé or at least a boyfriend, she simply said, “No, no man.” Then she would smile and let them think she was odd, if not unfeminine like so many working women, and once she got married that would sort everything out for her. 

Even if they could accept the idea of her and Carol together, because it was not a marriage people wouldn’t assume their relationship was Therese’s everything, although it was her first and last. Yet her capacity for work and thoughts of work had only increased in the last two years. Therese had discovered she had deep, hidden wells of thought and energy and emotion inside her, and while Carol was never far from her thoughts, she was not the sole replenisher of those wells. The work was its own reward. 

So much so that Therese’s apartment, into which she had moved after her return from the West was beginning to feel cramped. The walls seemed to bend outward under the weight of all her art books, her sketches and models, the furniture she had acquired with Carol’s help and all her beautiful new clothes. She knew Carol would be happy to have Therese move in with her, but that was not a compromise Therese was willing to make. While she stayed with Carol most nights or, more rarely, Carol came to her, Therese needed her own space in which to work and think and daydream and love Carol with everything she had. She did not wish to become merely a household fixture in Carol’s elegant Madison Avenue home. Therese had been so eager to please Carol when they’d first met, so desperate to fit herself into any available gap in Carol’s life, she could easily picture herself clinging to Carol like a choking vine, were she to accept Carol’s tacit, standing invitation.

“Do you know of anyone who’s moving out of an apartment with more than two rooms?” she asked Harkevy. “I’d prefer something close by.”

“I may. You can pay for it?”

Therese saluted him with her coffee cup. “If Francis’ French play suddenly acquires the need for a set, I might.”

Harkevy laughed. “I don’t see why you should wait that long. As a matter of fact, I think you’d be the logical person to design the sets for a play which will open in just a few months. It is set in a New England boys’ school, but do not be alarmed: it is a play of symbols and hidden meanings, plenty of material for your imagination.”

Therese nodded politely. Another New England setting. It must be a fad. “What is the story?”

Harkevy put down his cup. “A young man accused on peculiar inclinations. A teacher who cannot abide the thought of other people suspecting he might be like the young man. And the teacher’s wife, who decides to help the young man. Who is the corrupter, and who is the corrupted? And why do people always show such a keen interest in the affairs of others?” He was watching Therese intently.

She would be the _logical_ choice to design the sets for this play. Harkevy had noticed that Carol sometimes came to the same parties as Therese yet never attended a theater party from which Therese was absent or that she occasionally waited for Therese outside the theater with her car. In return, the endless succession of young, male assistants passing through Harkevy’s studio had not escaped Therese’s notice. 

The theater was so much its own world, replete with all kinds of people, Therese sometimes forgot that not everywhere could she exist as she did, love and work as she did. The play Harkevy described would be a collision of the worlds – or maybe not. Maybe dotted here and there throughout the audience would be women like Therese and men like the boy in the play, and it would all seem not at all strange, if just for one evening in the dark, surrounded by strangers. Maybe the world would seem to open up with possibilities, a road beckoning into the distance. 

Carol insisted the world was still where they had to live, but the world was not always the same as it had been the day before. Therese had understood this that morning in Waterloo. Living was a verb in the potential mode. That sounded like one of Carol’s epigrams, which had overawed Therese with their wisdom of implicit experience when first they’d met, and which she still loved to hear from Carol’s lips.

Therese smiled a private smile and lit a cigarette. “That sounds marvelous,” she told Harkevy. “Tell me more.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The Price of Salt_ was published in 1952 and completed the previous year, so I assume the action takes place in December 1950-January/February 1951. This fic starts in January 1953, which allows me to place Therese smack in the middle of big theater events of the period. 
> 
> The play she and Harkevy are working on is Arthur Miller’s _The Crucible_ , which had its premiere on Broadway on January 22, 1953. The play Harkevy talks about is Samuel Beckett’s _Waiting for Godot_ , which was indeed booed by some members of the Parisian audience in January 1953. The play Harkevy thinks would be a good fit for Therese is Robert Anderson’s _Tea and Sympathy_ , which actually opened on Broadway on September 30, 1953 – I fudged the chronology because it was just too good to pass up.


	2. Late Winter

Therese was working on a model for a play set in the backyard of a Midwestern house – the reference was wrong, strictly speaking, but Therese imagined some of the clapboard houses past which Carol and she had driven in Nebraska, and suppressed sternly her desire to do something unexpected with the model, make the house’s roof removable or the porch hollow – when her landlady knocked, making her start and bump a stack of books with her elbow. She skipped and slid over the slippery avalanche of paperbacks on her way to the door.

Therese followed her landlady downstairs to the phone, expecting it was Carol calling to see if Therese was free for lunch. The New England-set play Harkevy had told Therese about was postponed, so she was busy preparing the backyard model to show to Ned Bernstein in the hope that he’d take her on and she could pay the rent on her apartment while looking for another. She was beginning to feel stifled, had gone out the day before only to fetch milk and cigarettes.

To her surprise and delight, the caller was Dannie. He was in town to visit his brother and meet with some people who might invest in his research. 

“Of course I can meet you for lunch,” Therese said. She ran up the stairs, practically flew over the books strewn underfoot. 

Once in her bedroom, she paused at the sight of her _Petrushka_ model on the wall. Dannie had admired that model the first time they’d met. It had been Therese’s first inkling he might be a person after her own heart. Dannie was easy and comfortable, but he was also a man. He knew about Carol and still he had made plain his interest, his disbelief that Therese’s feelings for Carol could last. Yet he would not allow anyone to settle for him, his pride would not stand for it. Dannie’s pride was different from Richard’s. Dannie’s was a man’s pride, it came from accomplishment rather than boyish anticipation. 

Therese knew how easily she could start flirting with Dannie without intending it to go anywhere. She put on a pair of navy slacks and flat walking shoes, but she wore also her garnet-red coat, which lent a spring and sway she liked to her step. 

Arriving at the restaurant before Dannie, Therese took off her coat and sat down to wait. She liked to read when eating out alone, but she hadn’t brought a book and being alone in public did not frighten her as it had used to. She smoked and ordered a whiskey sour. People glanced her way, and she pretended not to notice.

When Dannie came in, tall and smiling at the sight of her, Therese wondered what he saw. She took better care with her appearance now than when he’d seen her last, out West. Her clothes were a quiet challenge, a border marker separating her from those who would intrude upon her. She wore red lipstick because it made her bolder than she was. She couldn’t abide the current fashion for pink and pearls and white gloves. 

In her mind’s eye, she saw Carol rustling the newspapers, her mouth quirking with mischief as she read about the new First Lady’s inauguration dress over breakfast a couple of weeks earlier. “She’s the prom queen as well as Mrs. President,” Carol had mocked. The memory made Therese smile as she rose to greet Dannie.

“Hello, Therese,” Dannie said. “You look well.”

This did not come close to saying everything he meant, Therese could tell. So much of life was vague, not just the important things. Therese returned the compliment truthfully. A waiter brought them menus and took Dannie’s drink order. 

They talked easily, about Phil and Harkevy, only in general terms about their work, enough that they both saw the other was content. Therese told Dannie about looking for another apartment despite not knowing how she would pay for it, because she was beginning to feel hemmed in by all the things she’d managed to accumulate in two short years.

“Why not shed some of the ballast?” Dannie said in such a tone that Therese couldn’t quite decide whether he was teasing. “When I moved to California, I only packed one suitcase.”

“You only had enough things for one suitcase,” Therese pointed out, and Dannie smiled as he always did, with acceptance and amusement at the world’s quirks. 

“Couldn’t Carol help you with the rent?” he asked. He was looking at the menu, as though he weren’t really interested. 

He was probing her for a reaction. Carol’s quick, sometimes cutting wit had honed Therese’s awareness of how people sought out chinks in each other’s armor. Dannie knew Richard, of course, and he knew about Carol, but knowing in a general way was different from being confronted with plain facts. 

Sometimes Therese felt like running through the streets, shouting till her lungs burned, or just wanted to hold Carol’s hand as they walked along or sat in restaurants and bars, where two women together attracted less attention for being together than for being women. The feeling came over her all at once as she sat across from Dannie in the restaurant booth. 

“I don’t accept loans from Carol,” she said. “Carol is my sweetheart, not my banker.”

Dannie looked up from the menu. His expression did not change. 

“Ah.” He said nothing else. Therese felt stripped bare by the truth, the silence folding around her like asbestos. 

“Yes,” she said. The small word landed into the silence and was swallowed by it.

Therese picked up her glass, grateful her hand was steady enough that the ice cubes barely rattled. Images crowded into her head: her and Carol’s names in the newspapers, designing jobs drying up, Carol fired from the furniture house where she’d been given a handsome watch at Christmas for being their best buyer, Carol’s landlord and Therese’s landlady watching as they were forced to vacate the premises. 

The only way Therese knew to make people look at her as much as she wanted and no more closely was to keep them in suspense. She could be affable, sociable, yet inscrutable. If they didn’t suspect she was holding out on them, they wouldn’t begrudge her her secret pleasures, her hidden life. 

Hidden and secret. Living in between what people assumed and what was could be exhausting, yet her moment of stark truth struck Therese as a reckless indulgence. Restaurants reminded her always of the night she had approached Carol at the Elysée, and how open Carol’s greeting had been, her little wave unprecedented in the joy it had expressed at Therese’s unexpected appearance. They were more circumspect in public usually, but Therese would not allow herself to forget the look on Carol’s face at the realization that she too had been chosen, for herself, not just for convenience or simple desire, and that the choice was reciprocated.

“Huh,” Dannie said at last. His brow smoothed out, he went back to his menu. 

Finally he closed it, laid it aside. Therese laid hers on top. She had no idea what to order, had barely looked at it. She needed to be facing Dannie without a shield in front of her. 

“I think I’ll try the steak," he said, lighting a cigarette. He offered Therese his case, which was new, he always carried cigarettes in their pack before. They’d both grown up, the journey west had changed them both, Therese thought. She craved a cigarette to fortify her, but she shook her head, waiting. 

“I’m thinking of getting married.” Dannie smiled through the smoke. 

Therese felt as though a balloon were inflating inside her chest while Dannie signaled to their waiter and pulled out his billfold to show her a photograph of a woman with wind-blown hair standing on a Pacific beach. 

“Her name’s Lucille, and her cooking could cure cancer. Carol doesn’t sound like the cooking type, from what little you’ve said of her.” 

Therese shook her head no, Carol didn’t cook much. 

“No wonder you’re here with me, then,” Dannie teased. 

Therese was almost laughing, almost crying, and told the waiter she’d have whatever Dannie was having, like she was his wife and he was giving her a treat by taking her out to eat. She relaxed in her seat, decided not to concern herself with whether Dannie thought her mad or the other diners assumed they were together. 

Later, she would wonder if he’d been mocking her, this man who wasn’t exactly her friend. Yet as she sat across from him and drank her cocktail and waited for her steak, Therese felt nothing but good will toward Dannie, who had liked her design for _Petrushka_ , and watched her closely, studying her like she was one of his physics problems, and refrained from assuming that his mere presence would be enough to light her up from within.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The play for which Therese is preparing a set model is William Inge’s _Picnic_ , which opened on Broadway on February 19, 1953. Carol mocks [the dress Mamie Eisenhower wore to her husband’s inauguration on January 20, 1953](http://archive1.jfklibrary.org/JFKWHP/1961/Month%2006/Day%2020/JFKWHP-1961-06-20-B/JFKWHP-KN-C18101.jpg).


	3. Early Spring

Love only lasted the first two years, or so received wisdom would have it. After two years of marriage, love gave way to other things: companionship, habit, rivalry, hatred. Love became a compromise and an arrangement. 

Carol was not Therese’s wife, despite Dannie’s teasing. Therese had learned that she could be angry with Carol, could feel hurt and betrayed by her, could act as standoffish and cruel as anyone else when they were hurt – and yet she could continue to love Carol through it all. 

They had been together for two years and counting, and still Therese felt the flutter in her chest, the anticipation in her bones when she was about to see Carol, every time like the first time, that day in Frankenberg’s. Even so, she feared the end of love in the same way she feared the bomb: a remote yet real possibility, the terror of which lay in its finality. In South Dakota, Therese had learned to exist without Carol, but she did not wish to ever live without her. 

None of this made telling Carol that she’d finally found an apartment with three rooms and rent she could afford, in a part of the city where she wished to live, any easier. Carol’s cool grey eyes watched her steadily, without blinking. Therese knew Carol better than to assume Carol was bored or indifferent about the news. Therese could feel Carol’s mood on her skin, like the aftermath of a summer storm out in the fields behind her old school, where she had once seen Sister Alicia run with abandon, only to realize the young nun had been chasing a chicken. 

“I see,” Carol said at last. “Well. Aren’t you clever?”

 _Carol_ , Therese wanted to say. Carol’s name contained multitudes, it expressed everything Therese wished to say. They stood a mere length of an arm apart in Carol’s airy living room, but a canyon may as well have yawned between them. 

_Carol, I love you, and I never want to be without you. But I need to have a place of my own. I need to be sovereign unto myself. I have never had that before, and I need it now, as I need you. Please understand. You are not diminished by it._

“I suppose it will do your work good, if you have a studio which doesn’t double as a kitchen or living room,” Carol said. She could always retain her calm in the midst of her hurt. Therese marveled at it and admired it.

She stood her ground, though she ached to go to Carol. If she tried to fill up Carol’s loneliness, she would get used up and Carol would remain unhappy, for some of what Carol wanted from Therese she wanted because she could not get it anywhere else. Carol enjoyed her work at the furniture house, but it did not absorb her as Therese’s work did her. Carol could pick it up and lay it aside as she wished, her work was an impersonal requirement and an amusement. 

As to other people, Carol was not interested in simply having her way with someone young and smitten and pliable. If that were all, Carol could have had any number of young men, especially now that being divorced lent her a certain air of loose, tragic wildness, like a hawk on a chain. Abby was her friend still, but Carol would not go back to Abby when she felt the hole gaping beneath her feet. Too many dangers lurked there. Anyway, it was not Abby whom Carol mourned and missed as though she were dead. 

One Saturday before Christmas, Therese and Carol had driven out in Carol’s car, not the one she’d owned when first they’d met. That one had been sold with the house, and Carol had bought a two-seater with her portion of the proceeds. “Her share of the loot,” she called it, like her marriage had been an act of piracy. Carol had driven with confidence and pulled over at last on a hillock with a good view of a sprawling country house with a pine tree in the front yard. 

The pine tree had jogged Therese’s memory. 

“Is that…?” 

“Yes.” The word had sounded curt yet soft. “Hush now. Let’s just watch.” 

They’d sat there until Therese could no longer wiggle her toes from the cold, but Rindy had not appeared. Therese had offered to drive back, and Carol had agreed without argument. She had smoked in silence most of the way back. When they’d emerged from the tunnel into the city, Carol had made the gesture Therese knew and loved, brushing her hair back with one hand then the other. Only it had not been her hair she brushed, but her cheeks. Water droplets had clung to her eyelashes, face powder had smeared on her gloves. 

Neither woman had said anything, but Carol had not refused the hug in which Therese enveloped her as soon as they’d parked and stepped out. Therese had embraced Carol right there, on the busy sidewalk in front of Carol’s apartment building. Her heart had thundered in her ears.

Therese could not imagine what Rindy might do when she was older, a woman in her own right. Would she keep herself at a distance from her mother, to which her father strove to accustom her, or would she hurl herself at Carol at the first opportunity, batter her mother with accusations? Therese might wish to protect Carol from both possibilities, but she knew better than to assume she could.

“I suppose it would diminish you to live here, with me,” Carol said and turned her back on Therese to pour herself a drink. 

She often drank when they argued, as she had used to do before she had taken Therese to Chicago and even further west. She drank when she was beset by the world’s judgment and her own troubled heart, which had seen the damage people could do with the best intentions in the world.

“Carol, no.” Therese told Carol’s back, her straight spine. “I just…” She paused, squeezed her fists, then decided to say the cruel thought which appeared in her head rather than swallow it unspoken. “I am not a dog curled up at your feet, waiting to be petted so I will have an excuse to wag my tail.”

Carol turned, glass in hand, and regarded Therese with blank astonishment. Therese felt the twin pangs of pride and hurt in how precisely her blow had landed. This was what she did not want: Carol and she becoming so wrapped around each other that they grew accustomed to stab as well as caress, lest their love grew dull with the passage of time, like a knife immersed in water. 

Carol sipped her whiskey as her habitual stillness returned. “Not a dog, surely. A small tabby cat slunk in from an alley and made herself indispensable with her purring ways.” 

Therese shook her head, determined to break up the fight she had started. “Carol, I will always be here. I will be here all the time, with you. But I need my own space in which to…” _To be._ “To do my work.” Then, because she felt like a liar for holding back and suspected that Carol knew what she was thinking anyway: “To be me.” 

Carol watched her, beautiful and reserved and inscrutable. Her expression was detached to the point of haughtiness, but Therese knew different. 

“All right,” Carol said.

Therese did not allow herself a sigh of relief. Neither of them could win this, they could merely negotiate an armistice. “Really?” 

“Have I a choice?” Carol cried. She made an expansive gesture with her glass, to brush off the effect of her words, nearly slopping the golden liquid onto the carpet. “Yes, really. I’ll adjust.”

Therese clasped her hands, though she had no need to beg. “I promise that nothing will change.” 

“It already has. But that really _is_ all right. I should hate for us to become like those plaster statues one sees in your artist friends’ studios, all stiff and unyielding.” Carol put down her drink and came to Therese and hugged her with practiced ease. Therese let herself relax at last. 

“My wise little girl,” Carol whispered into her hair, teasing, pricking her a little because Therese had hurt her, despite her words of forgiveness. “You know more of this than I do, it seems.” 

Therese clung to Carol’s waist and pressed her face to Carol’s fragrant neck. “I love you,” she told Carol’s soft skin. _For always_ , she almost said, but Carol should know that, shouldn’t she? She must. Surely she must know it. 

Carol kissed her. “I know. And I you, my dear Therese. With all my heart.” 

She would not say the word ‘love,’ not just then, too proud and bruised still, and that hurt Therese a little, but she did not begrudge it. These were storms, they passed. The two of them were bedrock and jungles blooming and the music of the heavenly spheres ringing together in harmony. 

_With all her heart._


	4. Spring

Therese had needed someone to see her before she could blossom like the Little Flower she was named after. Sister Alicia had seen her, or Therese had only convinced herself of this because she’d needed to be seen lest she disappeared. Then Sister Alicia had gone to California, and no one saw Therese for a long time, not as she was, only how she might be to fit them and their needs.

Genevieve Cranell was watching Therese with the same intensity Therese had once seen her devote to a sapphire brooch which matched her brilliant eyes, before she’d decided it was more costly than she was willing to pay. Therese suspected that Genevieve did not truly see her, Therese. She saw only what Therese could have been to her. After their first meeting, when Therese had left abruptly to find Carol, whom Genevieve had never met, Genevieve seemed to grasp with an intuitive precision that Therese would remain always beyond her reach.

“It’s so charming, Therese,” Genevieve cried in her acting voice, the one which carried to the stalls, as she surveyed Therese’s new apartment. “And so…” Therese watched her pick out a word. “So functional.” 

‘So small and shabby’ was what she meant. Therese did not mind. Genevieve would never see the appeal, to her a mere three rooms were entirely too few. 

“Yes,” Therese agreed warmly. “I wanted very much to have a room of my own.”

They were standing in the front room, with the bookshelves which looked smooth as butter after they’d been polished with wax and some of Therese’s designs adorning the walls. In the bedroom, the bed had a headboard covered in velvet the color of a plum ripe to bursting and was piled high with coats. People were packed into both rooms and the kitchen, celebrating Therese’s coup in finding the place, but they steered clear of the room Therese had set aside for her studio, as though they could feel Therese’s proprietary, secretive pride in that room, in what wonders she would work there, like a magician in his laboratory. 

Genevieve smiled. “Just don’t go drowning yourself in any rivers,” she told Therese in a loud stage whisper.

“Not until I have achieved my masterpiece, I won’t,” Therese replied. 

Genevieve didn’t seem to find Therese’s morbid joke as funny as her own, but it didn’t matter. Therese was pleased that Genevieve had come to her party, and that she was a good actress and she read books, or at least had heard about the people who wrote them. Therese was pleased her apartment was full of people. Stella Overton’s loud laughter rang out of the tiny kitchen, making Therese smile. 

She had learned with Carol, and even before Carol, with poor old Mrs. Robichek, not to let people slip away from her through hesitation or fear or a sense of her own unworthiness. That fleeting connection, whatever it was based on, was too precious to waste. Therese knew she was lucky that so many people from whom she’d run away in the past had accepted her with open arms when she’d called them or written to them after her return to New York. She could be on her own, but she needn’t be, and she could still do her work if she was with people, if she let them be with her. Harkevy sidled past through the crush of bodies and touched Therese’s shoulder and nodded to signal his approval of her new abode. 

Suddenly, overwhelmingly, Therese wished for Carol. Despite her cleverness and wit, Carol felt stiff and uncomfortable around Therese’s theater friends, so she had declined to attend Therese’s party. “You can give me a private tour tomorrow, darling,” she’d told Therese that morning. 

Now Therese wished more than anything that Carol was there and could say something clever and cutting, which would go clean over Genevieve Cranell’s head. Therese experienced intense, vicarious pleasure at the thought of Genevieve being vanquished by Carol, although she already was, in every way which mattered. Carol would squeeze Therese’s arm, the kind of touch with which they sometimes surprised each other in public, and whisper in Therese’s ear, a passing caress of cigarette smoke and perfume: “Your own battlements to defend now, my dear.” 

The mere thought sent a shiver through Therese, for she knew she had been right and not just trying to reassure Carol, that day in Carol’s apartment. She would always be there, Carol with Therese and Therese with Carol. Even in her absence, Carol lingered and transformed by her very being the air around Therese into something shimmering and better than mere New York air in early spring, full of grit and steam and life rushing like a torrent.

Once her guests had left, tottering and merry and complaining about the cold though you could smell green things on the air, Therese phoned Carol. It was late, but she suspected Carol would be up, drinking and thinking. 

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” Therese said, reveling in the luxury of being able to say that and have Carol understand at once who was on the other end of the line. “Are you dressed? You should come tonight, if you’re dressed. I can give you your private tour right now.”

Therese tried to sound brazen and irresistible, but the words sounded in her ears like half an invitation and half a plea. Therese felt warm with drink and the approval of her peers, but she craved Carol’s approval. Carol’s forgiveness, because she would not live in Carol’s home, as Carol’s sweetheart and nothing else. 

Carol was laughing. “Have you been drinking, darling?”

“No. Yes. Come and tell me what you think. You can help me eat some of the leftover food, have you eaten? My refrigerator isn’t being delivered until next week, and people drank more than they ate. There is cheese and fruit and two kinds of crackers and…”

“All right, all right, I’ll come. You naughty child. Tell me, now that you are lady of your own manor, will you be providing visitors with bed as well as board?”

Therese pictured Carol’s arch expression, the amusement tugging on her lips. She felt warm enough to consider opening all the windows until Carol consented to show up.

“Yes,” Therese said. “Everything. Only for one guest. For you. Will you come?”

Carol laughed again. Therese imagined her head thrown back, her throat exposed in triumph. “I’ll be there as soon as I can get a taxi.”

Therese hung up and wiped her brow. She felt light as well as light-headed. She had her home, filled with the things she had chosen for herself, which gave her courage and refuge, and Carol was coming to see it all and to stay the night. Together, they would stretch a single hour into eternity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I headcanoned that Therese was named after St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), called the Little Flower of Jesus. Therese and Genevieve reference Virginia Woolf’s _A Room of One’s Own_ as well as Woolf’s suicide by drowning in the River Ouse in 1941. The last line is lifted, with a tweak, from Patricia Highsmith’s diaries.


End file.
